"L. Sprague De Camp - The Hostage of Zir" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)

bad, at a good price."

Jussac showed a fire-opal ring. "Of course," he continued, "the art of faceting is
in its infancy here. I could show them a thing or two, if that Saint-Remy
treatment did not tie the tongue whenever an earthman tries to give a Krishnan
technical information. In passing," he added with a shrewd look, "do you get a
commission from local merchants to whom you steer your tourists, the way
guides do on earth?"

"No," said Reith. "For that, you have to live in the place. At Magic Carpet, we

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disapprove of such commissions. We can't control the local guides, but we bear
down on couriers from the home base."

During the following days, when not straining his guts in Heggstad's
gymnasium, or being lashed and prodded with a fencing saber, or cracking his
skull over the Gozashtando and Duro tongues, Fergus Reith learned to ride. He
rode an aya, which had six legs, horns, a hard trot, and a mean disposition. He
also rode a shomal, which had only four legs, looked something like a humpless
camel, and tended to balk like a mule.

He learned to use Krishnan eating tools, which were little spears held like
chopsticks.

Although Reith felt like a heretic on the losing side of a theological argument
with the Chief Inquisitor, he tried not to complain. His ancestor Robert the
Bruce, he told himself, had not complained in equally dire straits.

While Reith was being hardened for his task, Castanhoso took Reith's tourists up
the Pichide River to Rimbid and down the river to Qou. At Qou they saw a
village of the tame KoloftumaтАФthe tailed primitives of Krishna. The sight
touched off a furious argument between Professor Winston Mulroy and Shirley
Waterford.

"They were still at it when I left them," Castanhoso told Reith. "Mulroy brought
in intelligence tests, inter-species fertility, and those fossil terran ape-men called
austral-something. The Senhorita Waterford just talked louder and louder about
his racism. Anyway, nobody got lost or hurt."

One of Reith's last conferences before leaving was with Pierce Angioletti, the

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Comptroller. Angioletti was a thin-lipped, graying, reserved man with a